I am experiencing a lot of stress lately.

Partly because of my financial issues. My sisters are putting their heads (and wallets) together in order to find a solution and get a least enough of the debt paid in order to make the school happy enough to wait for the rest. I imagine they won’t be able to make a lot of progress on that until tomorrow, though, as I somehow doubt there’s anyone answering the phone or emails at Kwantlen Accounts Receivable on the weekend.

So that’s one Sword of Damocles hanging over my head. ^[1] Then there’s my health. That knee of mine is still aching and paining away. Oh, and cramping and spasming. It’s not as bad as it was earlier in the week, but then again, I have been off of it for the most part since I got home Friday afternoon, plus it hasn’t been exposed to the cold since then.

But mostly right now,. it’s this damned final project for Intro to Journalism. The writing part, of course, is not a source of stress for me. In fact, if that was all that was involved, I would be doing fine. Heck, I would be done by now, and that’s including the time it would take me to write, proofread, tune up,. and polish.

It’s the goddamned research that is doing me in. Again. Just like with the annotated bibliography. For this assignment, worth 20 percent of my grade, I have to write an article arguing a position on one of the controversial issues we’ve dealt with in class (easy) and provide TEN different sources to back up our argument (hard).

And I find that extremely stressful. Add in the fact that I have three other big bad end of the semester assignments due some time in the next week or so, and you can see why my blood pressure (and anxiety level) is peaking.

Maybe I should take one of those lorazepams that Doctor Costin prescribed for me for when I need immediate stress relief. They’re right here in my kitbag. Oh look, somehow the childproof cap came off and now all the pills are gone. You’d think they would be lying around on the bottom of the bag, but no. Maybe someone stole them, I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t have any of them left. None. They are gone, gone, gone.

Because the universe hates me. Evidently.

Or to put that another way :

Good one, Universe. You let me have just a few moments of hope then popped a squat and shit all over it. That’s classic you.

So far, I have a rough draft of the text of the thing and four sources. And that is by cheating. I started out trying to find sources then come to a conclusion on the topic (whether the media should report suicides), but that went nowhere. I am just cut out for the job of taking in a shitload of information and extracting a decision from it.

Top down it is, then. Meaning I wrote what I wanted to write, and now I am finding the sources to back up what I said. And that is proving to be pretty hard as well. I don’t exactly argue in a “facts and sources” kind of way. I am not a scholar.

Instead, I end up with deadly amounts of option paralysis. Fuck.

And what really pisses me off is that the professor has done absolutely nothing to teach us  how to do these things. I mean, sure, students should be able to write an essay by the time they hit college, but I am pretty sure they are not teaching how to write an exhaustively researched academic paper in high schools yet.

And what the fuck does that have to do with journalism, anyway? I could totally see expecting us to write, say, a column or editorial, and to have three or four sources for it, but ten? Ten sources, both academic and journalistic, for a 1000 word article?

I really doubt actual journalism works that way at all.

It really seems to me that he just pulled this final assignment out of his ass. In fact, it really seems like he pulled the whole course out of his ass.  All we do is class discussion of issues related to journalism. He hasn’t actually taught us a damn thing.

So I feel like I am being forced to do something I really don’t like doing for no damned good reason and without anyone lifting a finger to actually teach me to do it.

No wonder I am under a lot of stress.

I am getting the distinct feeling that I mind end up doing a half-assed job on this thing not because I want to, but because I just can’t handle the demands of it. That’s a hard thing for me to admit, but I might just not be up to this thing.

Whatever happened to learning to crawl before you’re asked to run?

Honestly, I feel like the prof just mentally checked out of this Intro to Journalism class. At some point, he realized that he could get away with just running class discussion and that doesn’t require much effort on his part, so he just rushes through that in class without a single thought in his head whether or not he is actually preparing us for the work he is going to expect of us at the end of the semester.

I can only hope he will be generous in the marking of said assignments. It is the least he could do given how he completely failed to prepare us for it.

Even if I don’t get phenomenal marks on the assignment, I will still do pretty good in the course. So it’s not like there’s a hell of a lot on the line.

It just stresses me the hell out to be asked to do something that has absolutely nothing to do with the course matter and that I have not be taught to do or prepared for in any way.

Oh, and it’s due tomorrow, five minutes before midnight.

And I have three other monster assignments lurking after that one.

I really could have used one of those damn pills.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I read this article from HuffPo today, and it really got me thinking.

In the article, the author talks about how for a long time, she thought she was an extrovert, but then felt ashamed of her desire for copious amounts of alone time. How she hates going to social events, and would rather be home reading or puttering around the house or cuddling her dog.

She didn’t realize she was an introvert. She thought she was an extrovert who hated people. And something in her reluctance to accept that she was an introvert really resonated with me and my issues.

For me, the evidence is clear. I am an introvert. Social time drains me, even when I am enjoying myself. I don’t know how to mingle and, to be honest, that word makes me intensely uncomfortable. I like working by myself and hate the idea of having to collaborate. I am quite happy in my own little world most of the time. I don’t feel the need for a lot of social stimulation. I am definitely the sort of person who wants a small number of close friends rather than numerous shallow friends. In fact, to be honest, I think it is impossible to have more than five or six real friends. The rest are just acquaintance. There is only so much friendship any one person can generate.

I don’t want to chat with taxi drivers, servers, cashiers, or other random people. I don’t want the manager of the restaurant to recognize me and sit down and strike up a conversation. I don’t like bright, noisy environments and would rather be where it is medium dark and quiet so I can hear myself think. When the masses go one way, I invariably go the other. I am an edge of the herd dweller.

The fact that I love good conversation more than nearly anything else in this good green world and that I am a loving and caring person doesn’t change the diagnosis one iota. I am an introvert, period.

But I don’t want to be. And that is the problem.

I want to be an open, friendly, adaptable person who can go anywhere and fit in and be totally comfortable. I want to be approachable and kindly and understanding. I want to be vibrant and dynamic and charming and just plain a wonderful person to be around. I want to make people happy just by being around. I want to be fun and funny and fantastic.

I want to be Fruvous.

And sometimes I am. But only in a virtual text-based environment. Because I am a furry and spend a lot of time pretending to be an idealized version of myself free of my issues and inhibitions, I have created and preserved a version of myself that is, in many ways, radically different than the real thing.

And that means I never have to face the issue of who I really am. And it means that I have, in a sense, a bifurcated personality. Some things I express in the real world. Others I express as my other self. Both are expressions of who I really am, but one is real and one is fictional, and I am starting to think that it might be time to end the masquerade and see what’s under my mask.

The thing is, I am ashamed of my real self. And my medical diagnoses has helped underscore that shame. I can lump all the introverted things about myself under the umbrella of “social anxiety” and treat them as pathological, and not actually “me” at all.

And it keeps alive the idea that somehow, someday I will heal and grow and recover, and then I will be the idealized version of myself, and everything will be wonderful.

And in the meantime, I can continue to be ashamed of my “antisocial” tendencies. And I can continue to feel weird and guilty when I “admit” to being an introvert, despite all the evidence. It’s like somewhere deep down, I feel like being introverted means being a cold, hostile, bitterly defensive hermit, and that’s the opposite of who I want to be.

Even worse, it’s the opposite of how I see myself.

No really, the fictional version of me that I pretend to me online is the real me! Surely there’s nothing wrong with that, right? I’m not really the emotionally cramped and constipated guy who is only comfortable in academic situations who can spend an entire day completely alone and only start feeling lonely somewhere around midnight. I’m not really the cerebral cripple who hides from the light.

No, I am the open, friendly, hilarious, adorable version of myself who easily approaches strangers and who radiates warmth and wit and wonder.

You know, the version who’s a fox. From space.

The real issue is the guilt and shame. That is what is keeping me from fully accepting that I am an introvert, full stop, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean I am cold or mean or sour. It doesn’t mean I am hostile and defensive and bad to be around.

I can be both a nice person and an introvert.

I just need to dream up a new version of myself that includes that idea. I am a quiet, bookish, introverted, gentle, sensitive person who is a very sweet fellow.

But the thing is, there is still another side of me that is a big, bold, obnoxious fellow who wants to live large without holding back.

I have so many sides to my personality. It’s crazy. No wonder I have always felt like a five dimensional peg in a world full of two dimensional holes. Three if you’re lucky.

Still, I know what comes next, at least. Make peace with my introversion. Uninstall the notion that introvert = bad person. Open myself up to drawing boundaries to keep myself safe. Maybe then I can feel more comfortable going out in the world.

Because now, I have my armor on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Anyone remember what show that line is from? I remember it from some show where there were people who lived underground and their exit to the surface was on some vaguely Gunsmoke-esque ranch.

Of course, that might be a near total distortion of what the show was actually about. These are some very old memories formed when I was very young.

And of course, it’s entirely possible that the phrase originated on Gunsmoke or Bonanza or any of the dozens of other Wild West shows that used to be as common as crime shows are now.

But what the hell.

Today’s been a good day. Had Psych 1100. Learned neat stuff about memory. At the most basic level, memory is just the tendency of synapses to change in structure if exposed to the same stimulus over and over again. That pathway then becomes optimized. If that goes on, you get a stable pattern that repeats in full when the right synapse is triggered.

In other words, it becomes a memory. Freaky to think it’s something so relatively simple.

I also learned that while memory involves all kind of brain regions (which makes sense when you think of all the things we can remember, like words, sounds, thoughts, ideas….. ), the master index file is the hippocampus. That’s the card catalog (damn I am old) without which the rest of memory is basically useless.

We also learned the story of HM, which is very sad but it made me so made I have to pass it on. Sorry.

HM was a young person who, after a head injury, developed severe epilepsy. As in, 20-50 seizures a day. He couldn’t learn much because the seizures kept him from consolidating memories. He couldn’t make a living, because his seizures could strike at any time. He couldn’t even take care of himself. He was, in short, a very sick man.

Enter Doctor Scoville. He was a neurosurgeon with a reputation as being a real cowboy, always taking risks and trying out new things. And he’s invented a procedure where, by removing one of the two hippocampi in the human brain, he had greatly reduced the frequency of seizures in a number of patients.

But golly gee, HM was REALLY REALLY sick. (Some of you already see where this is going. )

Yup. He took out both hippocampi, leaving poor HM unable to form any new memories because the index file was gone. For the life of me, I can’t picture the man’s reasoning. Did he really think that the hippocampus was just some useless organ like the appendix that you could just get rid of when it breaks? Like Nature and/or God had put them there for no reason? The mind boggles.

But this was in the bad old days of the early Fifties, when doctors were God and nobody ever questioned what they were doing and there was no such thing as an ethics review board.

As a result of that butchery, HM’s long term memory was gone. And he could not form new memories at all. For all we know, memories were being formed in the short term memory, and maybe even being stored all over the brain. But without a hippocampus, his mind could not access them.

As a result of the horror bestowed upon HM, Scoville at least had the decency to be wracked with pain and guilt and dedicated the rest of his life to arguing for the most conservative approach to neurosurgery, and reminding his fellow surgeons to not be such hubris soaked egomaniacs when dealing with actual people’s lives for fuck’s sake.

I might be paraphrasing.

Also today, when I got home, I had a nice long chat with my sister Anne on the phone. She and my sister Catherine are going to see what they can get done in order to cure my financial ills.

Which is wonderful news. But honestly, the best thing about it was the conversation with my sister. I hadn’t talked to her in many many years and it was so good to hear from my brilliant vibrant redheaded sister again. We had a tendency to trip over each other verbally because to be honest, we are both people with a really strong urge to speak, and so not interrupting one another was a real dos-y-dos.

But I loved hearing from her. I honestly should be the one to open the lines of communication more. I have the time, and connecting with my family always makes me feel a whole lot better. Reminds me that there are people out there whom I love deeply and who love me.

And frankly, I need to be reminded about that a LOT. I have a tendency to slip into feeling like nobody cares about me and nobody wants me around. And nobody wants to hear from me. If I contact someone, I will just be interrupting what they are doing and bothering them and they will be sitting there wishing I would just shut the hell up and leave them alone already.

I know that isn’t true. But those tapes run deep. There is a lot of ice separating my heart from the truth, and in many ways I am still that lonely planet that can’t really feel the rays of the sun.

All it can do is shine, shine, shine, and hope someone reflects its own warmth back at it. ^[1]

Also on the Funding Crisis 2015 front, my GoFundMe has attracted $160 of donations from people who are literally, scientifically, and morally the most wonderful people on the face of Planet Earth.

A lot of people will say they care. But when push comes to shove, it’s the people who step up and contribute who really count. The people willing to contribute whatever they can to get you out of a jam.

And that means even more to me than the money.

Makes me feel like ol’ George Bailey at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life.

And I can’t possibly thank people enough for that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time is passing  so fast these days that it feel like I am in freefall, plummeting toward the grave and picking up speed. Here it is, Thursday night again, and I feel like I was just here a day ago. Like waiting for the computer lab to open for us was just twenty four hours ago at best.

Like last night was tonight, in a way.

I have been here before. I am no stranger to this surrender to gravity. It comes with age, so everybody says, and I believe them. The older you get, the more there is to remember, but no more room to put it in. So we compress, and the space that once held twenty years holds thirty, forty, fifty, and more. And so from the point of view of our younger selves,  time sped up.

If only we could make sure our perspectives kept up with our years.

I remind myself, with increasing frequency (and fervency), that time has not, in fact, changed at all, and the days have the same number of minutes as when I was a schoolboy. It is only a trick of memory that makes us feel differently.

This truth rings increasingly hollow, and it occurs to me that perhaps I need to take a different approach. Maybe this is a sign that it is time to spread my wings and turn this downward momentum into level flight, or maybe even use it to soar past my petty limitations and touch the sky.

Momentum is energy and energy is power.

And I want power.

(—)

I’m in Creative Writing class. We are watching a video. I would rather be working on my final project. The last step is for me to edit the audio of me reading my poem. I can’t do that while the people on the video are talking. So instead, I blog.

I really should make myself an “I’d rather be blogging” pin on Cafepress.

I hate not being able on my thing yet. Oh good, it’s done!

(—)

Home now. Got the thing done. Here it is.

It’s not much, but it took me forever to make the damned thing in Premiere. Oh how I longed for my beloved ancient Ulead Video Studio 11 back home on this computer. I would have had it done in minutes, instead of two hours.

As I suspected, the stupid animated GIF I made first in Photoshop was of no use, and I ended up just taking framegrabs of the five stanzas and treating them as photos.

That’s where the fancy schmancy page-turning effect came in. Premiere is actually a pretty good problem once you learn its ways. I decided I needed to fancy up the thing a little, so on went the transitions. I wanted them to be faster, but every time I tried to reduce the duration, the damned thing disappeared on me instead.

And yeah, they’re cheesy, but I was working to deadline. Still, I saved the movie (.MOV) file to my DropBox, so when I am bored on winter break, I can import it into Ulead and add a title and ending page and other potential enhancements to come.

When I do that, the one that’s there now will be deleted from the YouTube account, so if for some reason you think it’s perfect exactly as it is, better save a copy while you still can.

Oh, and if you are reading this in the future and the embed doesn’t work any more, first of all, hi future people! Have we gotten over oil yet? Anyhow, I am sorry that I forgot to come back to this blog entry and update the embed of the poem.

But honestly, you are not missing much. I mean, the poem is okay, I guess. I would be lying if I said I spent a lot of time honing it to perfection. More like getting it to a minimally presentable state and shoving it out the door.

As a video, though, well…. let me put it this way. It’s not the sort of thing I would enjoy watching, and that is really the only meaningful test of any art, from the artist’s point of view.

An interesting thing happened on the way home. I called a cab, like I do on Thursday nights, and practically the moment I got to the bus stop, a cab pulled up. I got in, told him my address, and off we go.

Then I start looking around the cab and I can’t help noticing that the little red-led readout that tells you your fare is conspicuously absent. So is the usual console displaying a map of where we are. And I don’t hear anything like the usual radio chatter you hear in a cab.

In fact, the dude seems to be doing his taxi business via a tablet older than mine. Hmmmmm.

The clincher was when we got here. I asked the guy how much I owed him, and he shrugged and said “Six bucks?”. Then, when I got out of the cab, I gave it a good look over and noticed that while it did say Richmond Taxi on it, and it was the right shade of red, the Richmond Taxi logo was the one from ages ago, when the words were in gold in a fancy serif font.

So here is my theory : this guy totally does not work for Richmond Taxi. He has some way of hacking their data signal and an old Richmond Taxi he bought off someone, and is totally steal fares from them. That’s why he arrived so fast. You have to make damned sure you arrive before the actual Richmond Taxi shows up!

Not that I care. I got what I wanted at the price I am used to, so as a consumer, I’m satisfied. I am not gonna narc the guy out.

But he better watch it, because making money off a taxi service without giving said service a cut is a very big no-no in the world of short distance auto travel. If they catch on, the law’s the least of his troubles.

So move fast, Clone Cab, and don’t get greedy!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My wounded knee is acting up and it is starting to worry me.

No, not the one I bashed up getting into a cab last week. That one is mostly fine now, there’s just a little stiffness left.

No, it is the other one, the one I hurt a couple of years ago when I made the life altering mistake of crawling on my hands and knees for a few feet.

Apparently, that was a thing I shouldn’t do any more. Kind of sucks that I had to find that out in a way that meant permanent damage to my body (because we still can’t fix cartilage, shockingly enough), but what the hell.

Anyhow, lately it’s been acting up, and by acting up I mean causing me increasing amounts of pain, and I am getting worried that I will end up on crutches when I only have two weeks of regular schooling left in the semester.

Then there’s finals, of course.

If things get any worse, I am at least going to have to start using my cane again. Not looking forward to that, seeing as I am already plenty awkward getting around with my large size and large kitbag. A cane is not as bad as crutches on that score, but it is still not good.

And obviously, a cane is not a long term solution. For that, I will have to get myself to the doctor. When I first brought this injury to him, he said there was an operation that might help, or might make it worse, and all it could really do was clean up the injury site, and so forth and so on.

At the time, I didn’t think it was worth it, because I could cope fairly well with the injury. It honestly didn’t bother me at all for a long long time.

But then I went back to school, and started moving around way more, and then it got real cold. And it started to bother me more. At first, not a lot, but it has been growing worse over time for the last month or so.

Then I bashed the other knee, which caused me to favour my bad leg (with the bad knee) for a couple of days, and that’s when things really started going all to hell.

So now, the be-damn’d thing is cramping up painfully even when I am sitting here in front of my computer, and I am worried that I might have made the tear in the cartilage worse. And sort of wondering what condition I would be in if I had agreed to the surgery way back when.

Knowing what the wait times for non critical surgery are like, I would probably be getting that operation right about now!

Still, I am way more open to the idea now. If the condition becomes critical enough, I will have no choice. Then again, if it becomes critical enough, I will not have to wait so long for the surgery.

So in a sense, the systems is saying “Go hurt yourself!”. Kind of like when it ignores mental health patients unless they have committed a crime.

You know what to do, desperate nutcases!

I am hoping the cold is a big part of why the knee has been worse lately. Cold is notoriously hard on muscular conditions, and while cartilage is not muscle, the stuff in your knee has complicated layers of muscles all around it. So it could be that the muscles are spasming and that’s what is causing the pain. It certainly feels like some of the muscles have gone rigid, and when I massage them, it relieves the pain a little.

Maybe all I need is to stay inside and keep the area warm for a while, and it will calm down and not be so ouchy.

But ya know…. school. If only this had waited till after exams! I will have lots of time to nurse it then.

Which brings me to the question on my mind right now : what the hell am I going to do with myself over Winter Break? I am so used to having school in my life now. What will I do all day?

My first thought was that I will start a novel. I missed NaNoWriMo this year, but that’s not the only time in which novels might be written. I could take Winter Break as my own personal novel writing challenge, and finally start a novel with no particular end in mind and no particular word count.

Who am I kidding, the mere prospect of that makes me really anxious. So maybe I will have a daily word count based on the number of days I have divided by some goal like 60,000 words.

Part of my mind is already trying to do the math.

Still, I will be pondering a concept for a novel over the next week and change. I have not written any fiction lately. I am sure I must have ideas just waiting to come out. And boredom is a wonderful stimulant for creativity if you give it a chance.

I learned in Psych 1200 that you get the best performance from a moderate level of arousal. ^[1] And I was just reading in The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris that animal studies have shown that boredom only leads to listlessness and lack of direction up to a point.

Past that point, it has the opposite effect. It makes animals manic, even frantic. The need for stimulation becomes so great that absolutely any action that produces a result the animal can sense becomes repeated over and over again.

And it wasn’t just animals. He described an experiment where they took a bunch of undergrads and had them put on vision-blocking goggles, hearing-blocking headphones, and thick and extremely heavy gloves. These poor subjects couldn’t touch, hear, or see anything, and they kept them like that for three freaking days.

That sort of thing is where ethics boards came from.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Pondering what I will do on the way home with the $20 I have left in the week’s budget.

Originally I was going to do White Spot or similar. I have pretty much settled on taking a taxi home on Thursdays, so Tuesday after class is the next best opportunity to treat myself to a nice meal where I can munch and blog.

But then it occurred to me that the money might be better spent at Pricesmart, getting little fun foods to make my nightly meals less monotonous. Things like those mini pot pies I like so much, or some cold cuts to encourage my eating more cheese, maybe an onion. That sort of stuff.

So now… I dunno.

I have such a problem with indecision…when the decision is about me. In theory, my high performance INTJ mind should make me highly decisive. We are optimized for rapid deep judgment. But that only applies to situations where the answer can be derived via logical analysis.

Personal decisions are more emotional and unclear. Maybe there is an objectively superior option. Maybe not. But there are so many contingent variables that it can seem hopelessly complex.

(—)
On The Road : Baby It’s Cold Outside edition

At White Spot. Guess I made my choice. I took the path of least resistance. It is a path I know all too well.

In fact, to be honest, it tends to be my path of first resort. It is the path that ends my anxiety of indecision the soonest, and that is the nature of the sort of fast rising anxiety that I suffer from : its rapid rising nature leads to panic because it makes me feel like the waters are rising and I have to get out NOW NOW NOW!! Or something terrible will happen.

The same Something Terrible that compulsions make you dread. What is it, exactly? Nobody knows….it is too terrible to contemplate!

Probably some stupid bullshit that doesn’t even matter, though.

I have been thinking about anxiety and myself a lot lately. I am coming to the conclusion that my extremely high strung, anxious nature has been my worst enemy for most of my life. When I look back at those times when someone tried to befriend me in elementary school, anxiety was there, screaming in my ear, telling me to take that path of least anxiety. And when the anxiety is social in nature, the path of least anxiety is to break off the social exposure in the way that insures the least social exposure in the future.

In other words, rejection. And as a consequence, friendlessness.

Even when I got some sort-of friends, my time with them was basically one long anxiety attack. It is weird that it took me this long to figure that out. I guess it took a lot of recovery for me to be able to clearly recognize just how strange, wrong, and worrying that is.Weird

I was a real basket case as a kid. I mean… holy SHIT.

In fact, the more I look back, the more anxiety I see. Even when I was relatively happy, the anxiety was there. The only time I came even close to being without anxiety was when I was alone. No wonder I became so solitary.

My own body chemistry was conditioning me to fear my fellow human beings.

(Hmmm. East Indian dude ahead of me eating steak. Hmmm.)

So why was I so anxious? Basic temperament has to be part of it. Even when I was a happy preschooler with friends and my mother at home, I was an excitable kid. Even back then, I pretended to be cool and calm, but I was a little bundle of energy. And definitely the sort of kid who doesn’t wander too far away from Mama.

The issue, then, is how that energy got turned into runaway anxiety. The trauma of being sexually abused probably got that started. It only takes one incident to wreck a kid, especially one as young as I was at the time.

Holy crap, sudden skit :

(SCENE : The deck of the starship 1701-D)

Riker : O’Brien, beam them up.
Picard : Belay that order!
Riker : …you mean delay, sir?
Picard : Yes of course. Why, what did I say?
Riker : You said belay, sir.
Picard : Belay? How ridiculous. That’s not even a word. Number One, I order to you inform me immediately if I should ever make a silly mistake like that again!
Riker : ………
Picard : Okay, now what?
Riker : It’s…. not the first time you’ve said it, sir.
Picard : Good God, you mean I’ve done it before? When?
Riker : As far as I can tell, Captain, you’ve said it every single time you have meant to say “delay”.
Picard : But…. but that’s impossible! Surely you must be mistaken. If I went around talking like that, people would think I was an idiot. Data, what do you have to say about this?
Data : My internal databanks show that you have made that mistake exactly 1759 times in my presence, sir. Shall I analyze the logs for more examples?
Riker : I don’t think that will be necessary, Data.
Picard : Damn it all, I still don’t believe it!
Data : We anticipated that you might react this way, sir, so we took the liberty of inviting someone you MIGHT believe.

(Turbolift doors open, Doctor Beverly Crusher enters)

Picard : Not you too, Beverly!
Crusher : Now Jean-Luc, try to calm down. Don’t make me confine you to quarters.
Picard : (visibly calms himself) I’m…. fine, Doctor Crusher. Really. Say what you have to say.
Crusher : My dear Jean-Luc… for as long as I have known you, and for as long as my late husband Jonathan knew you, you have said belay when you meant delay. Every single time.

(Pizard sinks into his command chair, deflated. )

Picard : Well then why in the blazes didn’t anyone tell me?
Riker : We thought you already knew, sir.
Crusher : After all, my scans always find you to be the picture of health. No brain abnormalities.
Picard : Brain abnormalities, oh my god…
Riker : So we thought of it as just a harmless affectation.
Picard : You meant to tell me that you thought I chose to… oh my god.
Riker : What is it, sir?
Picard : I just realized why all those Denebian delegates laughed when I apologized for the belay.

(Everybody dissolves into gales of laughter, including, eventually, Picard himself.)

Well. That was fun. I should suffer more sudden skit attacks. That one needs a little work, but I think with a little spit and polish (mostly polish), it could be a very fan-pleasing skit.

I might even forward it to Patrick Stewart himself. I think he’d get a kick out of it.

Whaddaya know, I removed some childhood trauma and a skit popped out. So that’s where they’ve been hiding!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had an exam in the least favorite of my five classes, Ideology and Politics, the course I signed up for without even reading the description because it sounded so perfect for me.

Turns out, not so much. The subject matter is right up my twisted little alley, but the method… meh. Makes me think that I should not take any more political science courses, even though it may well be that if this course had been taught by someone else, I would be loving every minute of it.

As for the exam… well, I hope I passed. Nuff said.

Of course, not having the textbook is a serious hindrance. My fault, of course, because of my mighty fuckups. But it’s more than just not having the text. It’s a phenomenon I described on Facebook thusly :

Dear all my professors :
I can listen to what you are saying.
I can write down what’s on the slides.
But I cannot do both at the same time.
It used to be that the time it took for the teacher to write something on the blackboard automatically gave you time to write it down too.
But now its all education via Powerpoint, and the professors can press a button and give us hundreds of words to write down and just keep talking. And then they wonder why nobody seems to be listening to them.
It’s one or the other, professors. We cannot do both at the same time.

Of my three fact-based professors (Creative Writing and Journalism are not so much into the facts and tests thing), my Ideology and Politics professor is the worst offender for this, and that’s especially problematic for some without the text because my notes are all I have to go on.

Also, I have thought about this, and the questions on the test are pretty hard. Not unreasonably so, but still. They require a fair bit of mental muscle. If this was subject matter I had fully command of, I could do a decent job. But I don’t. I am honestly not used to having to learn this sort of thing. There’s a reason I don’t take History courses, and it’s not because of lack of interest. It’s that I don’t enjoy memorizing things and I have never had to learn to do it.

I got through school on my naturally high level of retention. For some reason, that doesn’t seem to be doing the job in this case. The difference might well be teaching method.

My professor can’t seem to decide if we should be trying hard to understand the concepts or working hard to memorize the facts. I think she may suffer from a lack of understanding (or remembering) what it’s like to be new to the subject. To her, all of this is basic knowledge, and I am sure that to her, this all hangs together naturally.

But to us, or at least to me, it’s mostly a string of facts that leaves little room for actually talking about the ideas, which is what I foolishly thought the course would be about. I suppose I imagined it to basically be a philosophy course with a political focus. If that had been the case, I would be enjoying myself a great deal more.

But instead, we’re covering more or less the entire history of modern Western thought as it pertains to Canada, and that’s a lot of ground to cover in a relatively small number of classes.

Oh well. At this point, I am just hoping to struggle through with a passing grade and a lesson learned about signing up for courses based solely on the title.

Otherwise, today’s been fine. I still have $20 left in the week’s budget, which is a nice feeling. Today was dark and wet and dreary and cold, but that’s par for the course these days. Today’s crazy person on the bus with me was a fellow across the aisle from me talking and gesticulating to himself in French.

It just occurs to me now that one of the stops for my beloved 405 is near where the Richmond Psychiatric Services, who only deal with psychotics and not us lowly depressives, is located.

You’d think I would have noticed a bus full of crazies before now, though. Perhaps they get more mumbly when it’s cold.

I am doing fine in my other sour courses, which is why I am not terribly worried about my marks overall. It just seems to be my fate that there will always be the one course that drags my average down, like gym, or the art class I took in high class in order to get out of taking gym.

I wish I could register for classes. But not till the finance issue is resolved. I am going to have to get moving on that soon, because the deadline is a week from this Friday. I am going to have to really put myself out there and ask for people’s help. It’s a loan, not a handout, but that doesn’t make an enormous amount of difference when the problem is the size of mine.

I know that there’s a site out there that is like Kickstarter but for people who need help with something important. Like, if someone needs a new wheelchair or their house burns down. I could really use some place like that. But for the life of me, I can’t remember what it’s called.

Instead, I am going to have to lean on my family and friends, and I am not happy with that. I am trying my best to get over this learned helplessness that has been dragging me down for so long. There is nobody coming to rescue me from myself. I have to learn to do things for myself. I want to be strong and independent. I want to be respectable instead of pathetic.

But I see no other way out. I have to save my own ass, and if that means begging for money, so be it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

See? I can break out of the box.

It’s been a decent day. Did not end up depressed, at least not yet, knock on wood. Started the day right by getting dressed as soon as I got up. I was still sleepy as hell, though, but I fought through it and got myself to a decent state of waking.

Admittedly, drinking a liter of Diet Coke helped.

and I got done the little things I was planning to do. Like finally getting Netflix working again. It stopped working because the payment was due Tuesday and I didn’t get my check till Wednesday. So they suspended my account till I paid up.

This has happened an embarrassing amount of times. They’re so patient with me. They know I will pay eventually.

So Wednesday, I cashed my cheque and put $30 on my brand spanking new VISA from Vancity, and the next day, I went to switch my Netflix account over to the new VISA instead of that piece o’ crap Money Mart one I used for years.

And it wouldn’t work. I put in all the information perfectly but it just said “This information cannot be verified”. That could mean a lot of things, but usually, in my experience, it means the network that does that kind of thing is down or otherwise fucked up from my point of view.

So I tried again later, then tried again a couple times on Friday, but it still didn’t work. And I was just about to throw int he towel and call tech support for my credit card and see WTF was up in the what-what today, but I decided it was worth one more try to see if the damned thing would work this time.

And of course, it did.

So Netflix is back in town, and I can continue watching Scrubs.

Ordered in tonight, which I am proud of. Not only does ordering in mean dealing with the dreaded telephone, it also meant I had to find out how to buzz the delivery person in. In the past, both of those would be big gumption traps. But not today. I decided I wanted to do it, found out what I needed to find out to do it, and did it. And it was good.

Well, decent. I took a risk and ordered a combo with foo young in it. Turns out I still don’t like it and neither does my stomach. But otherwise, it was good food. Cost about the same as eating in a restaurant and I didn’t even have to put my shoes on to do it.

Plus I got fried wontons. Num.

The place I ordered from, Bamboo Express, has a strange definition of “egg roll” though. And I knew this, because I have ordered from them before, but forgot. What they call an egg roll is this lump of fried batter the size and shape of a potato with a token amount of fried bean sprouts inside.

That’s not an egg roll. That’s a vegetarian corn dog. That’s a corn dog without the dog part. Sadly, that doesn’t mean it’s only corn. I would be happy with corn. I love corn.

But I don’t like corn dogs. I find them quite gross. And my opinion of these “egg rolls in name only (ERINOs)” is not much better. So, never ordering THOSE again.

So technically, I didn’t like two major components of my meal. But I ordered both of them, and it’s not their fault I don’t like them. Nor is it the restaurant’s fault. Live and learn, and all that.

Been pondering the environment and global warming lately, and I have decided that the enlightened behaviourist solution will never work. It was doomed from the start. The idea that you could save the world via getting people to voluntarily make drastic changes in their lifestyles for highly abstract reasons was never realistic or practical. But it took over environmentalism because was the nice-guy solution that jibed with the left wing’s general wimpiness.

Other solutions, more realistic ones, like political change and the technological solution, involve too much confrontation, hard work, and dealing with icky things like science and compromise for the liberal masses to handle. They prefer to live on a puffy pink cloud where they can pretend that just making people “aware” will magically solve the problem without them having to do a single thing outside of their left wing comfort zone.

But hey…. it’s only the future of the human race we are dealing with here. No reason to crimp your style.

So fuck the behavioural solution. And fuck the political solution too. Any plan that involves the world coming together as one to confront a problem in a mature and responsible fashion is a long shot to say the least. I am not saying that it’s impossible, but seeing as time is a factor, I don’t think we can afford to wait around.

The technological solution is the only one with any likelihood of success. It’s going to be up to people like Elon Musk, which I suppose should make the Objectivists happy. It’s going to be science that gets us out of this mess. If the equator is still habitable by human beings ten years from now, in 2025, it will be because we invented solutions to the problems caused by the unforeseen effects of our previous inventions.

Global consciousness is on the rise, thanks to the Internet. Walls are coming down at a breathtaking pace. People from opposite sides of the world are sharing the same links, laughing at the same memes, and talking about the same news stories.

But it’s still too slow. We need inventions that eliminate the need for lifestyle changes entirely, or that at least lower the lifestyle cost to something reasonable. People are willing to change, but only to a point. Anything that would be a major disruption to their life will get rejected out of hand.

It is science and science alone that will save humanity from itself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.